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Main Authors: Xu, Hao, Wang, Yinqiao, Mitra, Niloy J., Liu, Shuaicheng, Heng, Pheng-Ann, Fu, Chi-Wing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07012
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author Xu, Hao
Wang, Yinqiao
Mitra, Niloy J.
Liu, Shuaicheng
Heng, Pheng-Ann
Fu, Chi-Wing
author_facet Xu, Hao
Wang, Yinqiao
Mitra, Niloy J.
Liu, Shuaicheng
Heng, Pheng-Ann
Fu, Chi-Wing
contents Hand shadow art is a captivating art form, creatively using hand shadows to reproduce expressive shapes on the wall. In this work, we study an inverse problem: given a target shape, find the poses of left and right hands that together best produce a shadow resembling the input. This problem is nontrivial, since the design space of 3D hand poses is huge while being restrictive due to anatomical constraints. Also, we need to attend to the input's shape and crucial features, though the input is colorless and textureless. To meet these challenges, we design Hand-Shadow Poser, a three-stage pipeline, to decouple the anatomical constraints (by hand) and semantic constraints (by shadow shape): (i) a generative hand assignment module to explore diverse but reasonable left/right-hand shape hypotheses; (ii) a generalized hand-shadow alignment module to infer coarse hand poses with a similarity-driven strategy for selecting hypotheses; and (iii) a shadow-feature-aware refinement module to optimize the hand poses for physical plausibility and shadow feature preservation. Further, we design our pipeline to be trainable on generic public hand data, thus avoiding the need for any specialized training dataset. For method validation, we build a benchmark of 210 diverse shadow shapes of varying complexity and a comprehensive set of metrics, including a novel DINOv2-based evaluation metric. Through extensive comparisons with multiple baselines and user studies, our approach is demonstrated to effectively generate bimanual hand poses for a large variety of hand shapes for over 85% of the benchmark cases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_07012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hand-Shadow Poser
Xu, Hao
Wang, Yinqiao
Mitra, Niloy J.
Liu, Shuaicheng
Heng, Pheng-Ann
Fu, Chi-Wing
Computational Geometry
Artificial Intelligence
Hand shadow art is a captivating art form, creatively using hand shadows to reproduce expressive shapes on the wall. In this work, we study an inverse problem: given a target shape, find the poses of left and right hands that together best produce a shadow resembling the input. This problem is nontrivial, since the design space of 3D hand poses is huge while being restrictive due to anatomical constraints. Also, we need to attend to the input's shape and crucial features, though the input is colorless and textureless. To meet these challenges, we design Hand-Shadow Poser, a three-stage pipeline, to decouple the anatomical constraints (by hand) and semantic constraints (by shadow shape): (i) a generative hand assignment module to explore diverse but reasonable left/right-hand shape hypotheses; (ii) a generalized hand-shadow alignment module to infer coarse hand poses with a similarity-driven strategy for selecting hypotheses; and (iii) a shadow-feature-aware refinement module to optimize the hand poses for physical plausibility and shadow feature preservation. Further, we design our pipeline to be trainable on generic public hand data, thus avoiding the need for any specialized training dataset. For method validation, we build a benchmark of 210 diverse shadow shapes of varying complexity and a comprehensive set of metrics, including a novel DINOv2-based evaluation metric. Through extensive comparisons with multiple baselines and user studies, our approach is demonstrated to effectively generate bimanual hand poses for a large variety of hand shapes for over 85% of the benchmark cases.
title Hand-Shadow Poser
topic Computational Geometry
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07012